Undermining Same Sex Marriage Harms Children

One thing that has been on open display is the fact that harming children is perfectly fine with the Trump/Pence regime and its white evangelical Christian supporters - at least so long as the children impacted are non-white or live in same-sex couples headed house.  The border separation of children from the parents is sadly reminiscent of the slave traders and auctioneers who thought nothing of tearing apart African families forceably captured and transported to America.  It is all part and parcel of the dehumanization of those who are labeled as "other" due to skin color, religious belief, and/or sexual orientation - the true original sin of those who claim to honor the Gospel, yet forget its dictates the moment they walk out the church door.   Yesterday's Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling will only serve to accelerate attacks on same sex couples and their families by the "godly folk,"   In the context of the Christofascist efforts to undermine same sex marriage, a piece in USA Today looks at the harm this is doing to children - not that the Christofascists seem to care.  Here are article highlights: 

A Supreme Court ruling sanctioning same-sex marriage in 2015 was hailed as a milestone moment that would see discrimination crumble and equality triumph for LGBT couples — and for their children.

But in the past three years, those parents and kids have faced a brewing backlash that threatens everything from health benefits to a couple’s ability to adopt.

Two states — Kansas and Oklahoma — passed legislation in recent weeks that allows state-licensed child welfare agencies to cite religious beliefs for not placing children in LGBT homes, a troubling trend for LGBT advocates.

“We have to acknowledge that marriage equality was a huge victory for security and stability” for LGBT families, said Naomi Goldberg, policy director for the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), which released a report Monday documenting ways the 2015 ruling is being undercut and the consequences for kids. “But the landscape remains uncertain. Families have to think about ways they may or may not be recognized: when they travel, go to the doctor, go to a restaurant.”

[M]ore than two-thirds of Americans now back same-sex marriage — the highest level Gallup has recorded in the more than 20 years it has been surveying Americans on the issue.

In many families and communities, support for LGBT families flourishes, but “the gap is with legislators,” she said.

The report by MAP, a think tank that researches and analyzes laws with LGBT implications, and co-authored by the Family Equality Council, which has been working with LGBT-headed families for nearly 40 years, cites a refusal to recognize LGBT families by some government officials, state legislators and even courts.

The result puts children in peril on many levels, the report says: If a parent-child relationship is not legally cemented, children could be denied health insurance or a parent may not be able to make medical decisions.

Birth certificates to divorcesEfforts to undermine the 2015 ruling have played out across the nation in the past three years.• Arkansas was among several states that initially refused to place two married same-sex parents on a birth certificate until ordered to do so by the Supreme Court in 2017.• In Mississippi, a lower court refused to award parental rights in a divorce case to the non-biological mother of a 7-year-old boy conceived using an anonymous sperm donor. Eventually, the state Supreme Court affirmed the mother’s rights.• In Texas, Houston is fighting for rights for its gay workers after the state Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision favoring benefits for legal spouses of city employees, which could include same-sex spouses. The state Supreme Court action is alarming, Goldberg said, because it suggests the court didn’t think the landmark 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage also extended to employment benefits.  

Religious exemptionsSupporters of religious exemptions —  laws that let people, churches, non-profits and sometimes businesses cite religious beliefs as a reason to not comply with a law — say exemptions are an American right, dating to the Revolution. The laws "teach us how to live in a pluralistic society that recognizes we don’t all believe the same thing," said Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst at Focus on the Family, a Christian conservative [hate group] organization that opposes same-sex marriage. But exemption laws loom large over the daily lives of LGBT families, according to the MAP report. Currently, 21 states have some type of religious exemption laws on the books.  . . . . Only 19 states and the District of Columbia have protections from discrimination in public accommodations — meaning that in most places in the country, LGBT parents and kids can be refused service or booted from a business by someone who cites a religious belief. A 2018 proposed federal rule by the Health and Human Services Department that would let health care providers decide what procedures to perform and what patients to treat based on their religious beliefs adds more firepower.  “What we are seeing really privileges doctors’ religious beliefs over a patient’s best interest,” Goldberg said, noting that if an LGBT person lives in a rural area with only one or two doctors the individual could not have access to health care at all. 

Indeed, there are a number of reported cases where doctors have refused to provide care to the children of same sex couples.  The Hippocratic oath loses out to Bible thumping. As noted, in rural areas with few alternatives available, this phenomenon can become life threatening. In my view, religion remains one of the great evils in the world. 

The GOP's War on Medicaid

Tom Price, President-elect Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, has made proposals to deeply cut Medicaid. Credit Joshua Roberts/Reuters        

The reality is that many of the working poor and elderly facing the need for long term care in their declining years depend greatly on Medicaid.  By extension, so do many health care providers, especially non-profit hospital systems that must treat all whether they have insurance or not.  Despite these realities, the Republican Party led by the always heinous Paul Ryan (born into wealth himself) seeks to dismantle the Medicaid system as well as Medicare.  If successful, America will return to the Gilded Age when the wealthy had quality health care and most of the rest of society did not.  The GOP message to the working poor and non-wealthy elderly is "please die and do us a favor."  This from the political party that feigns to cherish "Christian values."  The big question remains on e of when the idiots who gave into appeals to hate and bigotry and voted for Trump and Congressional Republicans wake up and realize that they have cut their own throats and figuratively signed their own death warrants.  As stated before, I have zero sympathy for adults who did this, but the price paid by millions of children will be deadly.  An article in the New York Times looks at this foul GOP agenda.  Here are highlights:

Progressives have already homed in on Republican efforts to privatize Medicare as one of the major domestic political battles of 2017. If Donald J. Trump decides to gut the basic guarantee of Medicare and revamp its structure so that it hurts older and sicker people, Democrats must and will push back hard. But if Democrats focus too much of their attention on Medicare, they may inadvertently assist the quieter war on Medicaid — one that could deny health benefits to millions of children, seniors, working families and people with disabilities.

Of the two battles, the Republican effort to dismantle Medicaid is more certain. Neither Mr. Trump nor Senate Republicans may have the stomach to fully own the political risks of Medicare privatization. But not only have Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Tom Price, Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, made proposals to deeply cut Medicaid through arbitrary block grants or “per capita caps,” during the campaign, Mr. Trump has also proposed block grants.

If Mr. Trump chooses to oppose his party’s Medicare proposals while pushing unprecedented cuts to older people and working families in other vital safety-net programs, it would play into what seems to be an emerging strategy of his: to publicly fight a few select or symbolic populist battles in order to mask an overall economic and fiscal strategy that showers benefits on the most well-off at the expense of tens of millions of Americans.

Without an intense focus by progressives on the widespread benefits of Medicaid and its efficiency, it will be too easy for Mr. Trump to market the false notion that Medicaid is a bloated, wasteful program and that such financing caps are means simply to give states more flexibility while “slowing growth.” Medicaid’s actual spending per beneficiary has, on average, grown about 3 percentage points less each year than it has for those with private health insurance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — a long-term trend that is projected to continue. The arbitrary spending caps proposed by Mr. Price and Mr. Ryan would cut Medicaid to the bone, leaving no alternative for states but to impose harsh cuts in benefits and coverage.

Mr. Price’s own proposal, which he presented as the chairman of the House budget committee, would cut Medicaid by about $1 trillion over the next decade. This is on top of the reduction that would result from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which both Mr. Trump and Republican leaders have championed. Together, full repeal and block granting would cut Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program funding by about $2.1 trillion over the next 10 years — a 40 percent cut.

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that a similar Medicaid block grant proposed by Mr. Ryan in 2012 would lead to 14 million to 21 million Americans’ losing their Medicaid coverage by the 10th year, and that is on top of the 13 million who would lose Medicaid or children’s insurance program coverage under an A.C.A. repeal.

The emerging Republican plan to “repeal, delay and replace” the A.C.A. seeks to further camouflage these harmful cuts. Current Republican plans to eliminate the marketplace subsidies and A.C.A. Medicaid expansion in 2019 would create a health care cliff where all of the Medicaid funds and subsidies for the A.C.A. expansion would simply disappear and 30 million people would lose their health care.

Sweeping cuts to Medicaid would hurt tens of millions of low-income and middle-income families who had a family member with a disability or were in need of nursing home care. About 60 percent of the costs of traditional Medicaid come from providing nursing home care and other types of care for the elderly and those with disabilities.

While Republicans resist characterizations of their block grant or cap proposals as tearing away health benefits from children, older people in nursing homes or middle-class families heroically coping with children with serious disabilities, the tyranny of the math does not allow for any other conclusion.

Democrats at all levels of government must aggressively communicate the degree to which these anodyne-sounding proposals would lead to an assault on health care for those in nursing homes and for working families straining to deal with a serious disability, as well as for the poorest Americans. With many Republican governors and local hospitals also likely to be victimized by the proposals of Mr. Ryan and Mr. Price, this fight can be both morally right and politically powerful. Republicans hold only a slight majority in the Senate. It would take only three Republican senators thinking twice about the wisdom of block grants and per capita caps to put a halt to the coming war on Medicaid.

America, largely thanks to Republicans and their "Christian" voting base, remains the only advanced industrial nation that views the bulk of its citizens as disposable garbage.    We have the least efficient healthcare delivery system and spend far more per capita on healthcare while receiving less benefit. Congressional Republicans want to make a bad system far worse and in the process likely kill thousands, if not millions of Americans over time if their agenda is realized.  It is because of these "Christian" politicians and their evangelical supporters that I no longer call myself Christian.  To me, being a Christian is something reprehensible and evidence of moral bankruptcy.   Sitting in the pews each week while voting for Republicans who push this agenda is the height of hypocrisy.  The Biblical Pharisees were far better than today's "conservative Christians."

Abuse of Children Under the Smoke Screen of "Religious Freedom"

Which of these babies doesn't deserve to be treated?

A Michigan doctor's refusal to treat a 6 day old baby because her mothers were lesbian is drawing much needed attention to the hypocrisy of Christofascists who pretend and disingenuously claim to be concerned "about the children" even as their anti-gay policies harm children literally on a daily basis.  Indeed, one hears these lies from the hate merchants at The Family Foundation ("TFF"), Virginia's leading hate group, even as they oppose any measure that would give the children of gays the same social safety net protections enjoyed by the children of heterosexual couples (TFF also opposes Medicaid expansion that would bring access to health care to thousands of children).  A piece in Slate looks at both the Michigan situation and the larger damage done to children by the "godly folk."  Here are highlights:

Last September, Krista and Jami Contreras of Detroit met with Dr. Vesna Roi for a prenatal checkup. Believing they had developed a strong rapport with the pediatrician, the couple returned shortly after the birth of their child for the newborn’s routine wellness appointment. When they arrived, another doctor informed them that, after praying on it, Roi had decided to refuse to treat the 6-day-old baby girl. The reason? Her mothers are lesbians.

Roi’s willingness to inflict collateral damage on an infant just to express her anti-gay animus obviously makes her a monstrously immoral person, as well as a terrible doctor.

Under state and federal law, Roi’s actions were perfectly legal.  Even those conservatives who generally support legalized discrimination against LGBTQ people seem shocked by Roi’s decision. 

Who, after all, could have enough hate in their hearts to disadvantage a child just because of her parents’ identity?   Everybody who opposes same-sex marriage, actually. Few social movements actively harm American children—economically, socially, mentally, physically—as much as the battle against marriage equality. When states refuse to recognize gay parents’ marriages, they impose steep financial burdens on those parents’ children, forcing parents to pay more in taxes while preventing them and their children from obtaining state health care benefits and social services.

Children of unmarried gay couples could also be ineligible for health insurance through their parents on account of their state’s discriminatory laws. 

Economic impediments are only the most visible of a broad array of emotional and social scars these cruel laws inflict on children. In some states, gay parents are not permitted to jointly adopt their children, forcing one parent to be a legal stranger to his child. With no custodial rights over his child, a gay parent may be prohibited from authorizing medical treatment for his own child in the case of a medical emergency. 

Perhaps more distressingly, recent studies have confirmed that the stigma that conservatives foist upon the children of gay couples, married and unmarried, wreaks havoc on those children’s mental health. The often vicious debate over gay people’s relationships sends a message to their children that their parents are deviant, lesser-than—and that they, too, are inferior, for being part of an aberrant, ersatz family. We know, of course, that without this stigma, the children of gay couples would be just as happy and healthy as the children of straight couples. 

But thanks to the Christian right’s quest to demean and debase gay relationships, gay parents’ children are being saddled with utterly preventable stress and depression.

The next time you hear a "godly Christian" demeaning gays and peddling hate, call them out and spurn them socially.  Better yet, get your friends and family members to do likewise.  These people need to become despised social outcasts.  One cannot choose to be straight, but one actively chooses to be filled with hatred of others while using "religious belief" as justification for one's vicious behavior.